Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal
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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 63-75
Book Reviews Jacobs, Alan. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 256 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Rachel B. Griffis
In the last decade, Alan Jacobs has written several thoughtful and accessible books that explore cultural, intellectual, political, and moral issues pertinent to educators and their work with students. For example, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011), articulates the challenges twenty-first century readers face not only in the age of the internet but in a society that prioritizes practicality and productivity at the expense of delight and rest. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (Currency, 2017) connects the incorrigible rancor pervading many conversations, in both public and private spheres, to insufficient thinking. In this pithy book, which was named one of “10 Books to Read the Summer Before College” in 2019 by Christianity Today, Jacobs provides strategies for fostering a sharp, charitable mind and generous modes of communication. In The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Jacobs again broaches serious questions that reflect the current cultural terrain of many Western countries, though this book does so by looking backward, to the conclusion of World War II. He focuses on work produced by five Christian intellectuals—Jacques Maritain, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and T.S. Eliot—at this significant moment in Western civilization. Jacobs notes that these thinkers “believed that they had a responsibility to set a direction not just for churches but for the whole of society,” and that each was completing or in the midst of projects that explored this responsibility in 1943, when the outcome of the war was clear (xi). Maritain and Auden both gave notable lectures, “Education at the Crossroads” by the former and the latter, “Vocation and Society.” Lewis also gave the lectures that would become The Abolition of Man, Weil was working on The Need for Roots, and Eliot had recently finished writing the concluding piece of Four Quartets, “Little Gidding.” By discussing these five thinkers alongside one another, Jacobs highlights the significant questions and concerns that preoccupied Christian intellectuals who witnessed significant cultural shifts of which the twenty-first century academy is an inheritor, particularly those related to learning, morality, politics, and civic life.
